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Palmdale man gets 63 years to life for rape of 10-year-old in Antelope Valley movie theater

A 35-year-old Palmdale man convicted of raping a 10-year-old girl in a movie theater was sentenced on Tuesday to 63 years to life in prison for the 2006 attack.

Marque Clark was found guilty last month of forcible rape, kidnapping to commit another crime, aggravated sexual assault, sodomy of a person under 14 and forcible lewd act on a child.

Clark will not be eligible for parole until he’s nearly 89, said prosecutor S. Kelly Cromer of the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office. The sentence is comprised of two consecutive terms, Cromer said.

The sentence, handed down by Superior Court Judge Lisa Chung, stems from the Aug. 29, 2006 incident in which Clark forced the girl at knifepoint from a hallway into the back of an empty movie theater at the Cinemark Movies 10 in the Antelope Valley Mall. He raped her behind a movie screen, then fled out a back door.

Sheriff’s deputies arrested Clark three weeks later on DNA evidence and found the girl’s cell phone hidden behind some bushes at his home, where he told them they would find it.

Detectives, who were interviewing sex offenders in the area, had originally visited Clark’s west Palmdale home to talk to his 60-year-old father, a registered sex offender convicted of molesting a girl in the mid-1980s.

But Clark’s father wasn’t home, and while talking to detectives, Clark admitted that he had been at the mall the day of the attack. Detectives obtained mall security camera footage and noted a man who resembled Clark. He later failed a lie-detector test when taken into custody and confessed to the crime, detectives said.

Clark’s public defender, Steve Kwon, could not be reached for comment.